Murders Around Mississippi

"Behind the Cotton Curtain" was used in the 1964 Mississippi Freedom School curriculum. The author provided a powerful look at Mississippi's culture of death ...


BEHIND THE COTTON CURTAIN
By Charles Remsberg

As twilight crept over the hills of Mississippi's Piney Woods one evening last October, six college students climbed into their car after a day in the "niggertown" section of tiny Lumberton. The six, including two Yale divinity students, hoped to drive the 25 miles to Hattiesburg before dark. For when the cotton boll moon rises behind the long leaf yellow pine, "people down here (says a native Mississippian) sometimes lose all sense of responsibility to themselves, their consciences, their friends and their God; they become just masses of energy, and when they're mad, they'll do most anything to you." The students' car, however, would not start. Someone had poured water in the gasoline tank. . .


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